July 08, 2003
Deathday
You may think it morbid, but I have decided that June 14 is my "deathday". June 14, 2043, at 10:47 AM, in fact.
You see, it occurs to me that I'm going to die one of these days. As much as anything else, that's a fact of life. Dying doesn't really scare me too much, but it is pretty intangible and hard to think about, and as a result I think that I, like many people, tend to spend my time as if I was going to be here forever. This is plainly not the case. Acting like you're going to live forever can (and does, in my case), lead to wasting a lot of time. As I approach the age of forty, I find myself feeling a pinch of regret now and then about that amount of time I've spent — say — watching M*A*S*H. I'll use my deathday to reflect on such things and maybe it will help me to light a fire under my ass and actually do something, rather than sitting around in the livingroom waiting to die.
As well, there are certain things in your life that you really ought to consider now and then, like making sure you have an up-to-date will and planning for your retirement. Marking a death day on your calendar can provide you with an incentive to do these things, and others.
During a recent vacation I found myself thinking about this and decided that I'd determine my death date. For reasons of common sense, I didn't want my death date to be on my birthdate, so I decided I'd take my nominal conception date (birthdate plus 3 months) and call that my death day. To figure out the year I was going to die, I checked the latest Statistics Canada life expectancy data and found out that Canadian males born in 1966 have a life expectancy of 77.1 years. Rounded that off to 77, and voila: June 14, 2043. That means I've got about 40 years left. That's only 14,586 days.
Hmmm. Gotta go. The Simpsons is on....